retail-attach-and-service-mix

name	retail-attach-and-service-mix
description	Lift the two margin levers the chair controls: retail attach (product sold alongside the service, on trust the provider already earned) and service mix (tilting the book toward higher-margin services). Read revenue and margin per service hour, not just bodies through the door.

Retail Attach & Service Mix

Two levers move margin without adding a single appointment: what the client buys on the way out, and which services fill the hours. This skill works both.

The loop

1. Read revenue AND margin per service hour. A full book of the lowest-margin service is a busy business losing ground. Rank services by contribution per hour (price minus product/back-bar and time cost), not by popularity.
2. Tilt the mix deliberately. Promote, schedule, and price toward the higher-contribution services and add-ons — an add-on service is incremental margin on an hour you already sold. Coordinate menu pricing with the pricing tree in ../../knowledge/salon-spa-decision-trees.md.
3. Attach retail at the chair. Product attach rides on the provider's earned trust — the cheapest incremental margin in the building. Build the recommendation into the service (during, not at the register) and measure attach per provider. Treat benchmark attach rates as [verify-at-use].
4. Wire it to checkout. Retail and the rebook happen at the same moment — coordinate with ../booking-and-no-show-control/SKILL.md so the checkout captures both.

Metrics

Metric	Reads	Note
Retail attach rate	tickets with retail / total tickets	The margin lever the owner controls; [verify-at-use] on norms
Retail-to-service ratio	retail $ / service $	The classic salon health ratio
Contribution per service hour	(price - product - time cost) / hr	Reveals the low-margin full book
Add-on / upgrade rate	add-on tickets / total	Incremental margin on sold hours

Anti-patterns

• Chasing traffic when the margin lever is attach at the existing chair.
• Ranking services by count instead of contribution per hour.
• Retail "at the register" instead of recommended during the service.
• Discounting the high-margin add-on that clients would pay full price for.

See also

• ../chair-and-room-utilization/SKILL.md — mix drives revenue per available chair-hour.
• Best practices: ../../best-practices/retail-is-margin-the-service-cant-match.md, ../../best-practices/price-the-menu-on-time-and-demand.md.
• Template: ../../templates/service-menu-and-pricing.md.